The present invention relates to portal-based pervasive computing, and more particularly, to methods, apparatus and computer program products for providing user interfaces in a portal-based pervasive computing environment.
A common task with the expansion of the Internet is the development of web-based user interfaces to legacy applications, such as Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) (e.g., Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems), databases, and mainframe applications. Conventionally, web-based user interfaces to such applications may be constructed using what is commonly referred to as a “Model-View-Controller” (MVC) architecture. According to an MVC paradigm, user input, modeling of the external world, and visual feedback to the user are explicitly separated and handled by three respective types of objects or entities, each specialized for its task. For example, a view may manage graphical and/or textual output to a portion of a bitmapped display that is allocated to its application, a controller may interpret mouse and keyboard inputs from the user, commanding the model and/or the view to change as appropriate, and a model may manage the behavior and data of the application domain, respond to requests for information about its state (usually from the view), and respond to instructions to change state (usually from the controller).
Conventionally, web user interfaces are often developed by creating custom view and controller objects for each user that are designed to interact with a source of data, for example, a database or an application such as a customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. Such an approach, however, can be inefficient.